Semicolons

Semicolons are just what they sound like. 

Since you understand those definitions, you understand semicolons perfectly. Go forth and use them with confidence.

---

Wait. You still don’t entirely understand semicolons? Seriously‽ Alright, let’s try this again.

You may recall that with a full colon—no jokes, please—you can put anything you want after the colon as long as you have a complete sentence introducing that “anything” before the colon. With a semicolon, you still need a complete sentence before, but you also need a complete sentence after. In essence, you are connecting two sentences by simply swapping out the period between them for a semicolon.

Let’s look at an example of how semicolons might appear on a grammar test.

As always, as soon as I identify this as a punctuation question, I draw a line—usually just in my mind, but sometimes physically on the page—between the two parts of the sentence. Then, I look at what’s happening on either side of the line. “The trees are enormous” is before the line, and it is a complete sentence. “They have an otherworldly quality and stand almost 300 feet tall” is after the line, and it is also a complete sentence. Because I have a complete sentence before and after the line, I must use appropriate punctuation (like a semicolon) to separate the sentences from each other. Therefore, the answer must be C.

Are we related?

People sometimes get confused as to how thematically similar the sentences have to be in order to use a semicolon. On the test, you never have to worry about this detail. In your own writing, just make sure you’re not getting too crazy. If your sentences aren’t closely related enough to use a semicolon, they probably aren’t closely related enough to be together in the same paragraph.

The trees are enormous; I constantly see a pearlescent unicorn named Garbanzo Steve.

One last note on semicolons

Rarely, semicolons will be used to separate items in a list—if there is a list within one or more items in the larger list. In that case, you should use semicolons to separate the items in the main list and commas to separate the items in the list-within-a-list. 

Want to learn about colons?
Head over to this blog post! If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who may find this information useful as well.